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1 May 2018

How to Implement Technical Change in an Organisation

Your time is short and valuable, so I will not waste it on fluff. You would, however, need to take on these points and do more research on them, in the event that you like and agree with them.

You are in a company and you see a glaring issue that you would like to solve. You have an idea or some experience that your solution might be helpful. However, its frequently difficult to implement change in companies (there are entire books and MBA courses on it). Sticking to IT/technical problems, here are 3 points that can help you implement technical change in an organisation.

Social Capital

This could be 'understand politics' or it could mean 'being friendly' or it could mean 'being consistently reliable and hardworking'. Either way, you can implement change by spending your social capital. Please note: you will not get this social capital back, even if your idea works amazingly well.

Expertise

If you are the expert in the area and you want to implement technical change, the resistance to your idea may be greatly reduced. Personally, I like giving presentation to people inside the company. Then if I want to make a change, the conversation would usually go this way: "Hey, do you remember that presentation I did a while back? I was thinking of implementing one of the points I had in there. It wont take too long and I will make sure it works." "What presentation? oh that one.. yeah, yeah.. sure. Just let me know when X is done and Y is finished".

De-Risk

Usually, a lot of the resistance to change is due to the risk of something going wrong. If your idea carries certain unacceptable or high risk, try to reduce the scope of the change or remove some of the moving parts. The idea is to still implement the 'core' of the technical suggestion or break it down into steps - where if the first step succeeds, then the second step would be less risky.